SOA centers take apps apart to put them back together

When you’re as big a services company as IBM ($12 billion in third quarter 2006 alone), doing work for as many customers as Big Blue does, you start to notice some patterns in the work you do.

Take insurance. IBM counts many insurance companies as customers, and their needs are unique. But they also tend to share some of the same business processes, such as RQI (rate quote issuance), the process for developing a rate quote for home or automobile policies.

[Read about Webify, the company that provides the basis for IBM’s SOA platform.]

Rather than just consulting a table, insurance companies doing RQI need to hook into information about where the customer lives, their credit history, driving record, as well as the history of the car or property that the customer is trying to insure, says Brett MacIntyre, IBM’s vice president for Composite Services Development.

“If you look at the business decomposition of a business solution, there are component services that are common across each of them,” MacIntyre says.

Rather than code and re-code slightly different flavors of the same component for each client, IBM plans to build the RQI process into a reusable asset that reflects the best practice in the insurance industry, he adds.

RQI is just one of a hundred such reusable SOA (service oriented architecture) components that IBM has built and that are now being used to build new solutions from the ground up for each client. The components are part of a larger effort at IBM to leverage the company’s deep application development and IT services expertise to create a storehouse of reusable assets that can be used with customers of all stripes.

Now IBM is taking the promise of SOA reusability a step further: setting up SOA Solutions Centers at Pune, India, and Beijing. Their charter: to identify and create composite business services that can be reused by other customers in the same industry.

“What we are really doing by building reusable assets is allowing customers to build their solutions that much quicker and become very flexible,” MacIntyre says.

“Customers are going to be able to reconstitute to be able to meet a new business dynamic,” MacIntyre says.

The SOA Centers are among the first of their kind, although other IT services vendors are moving quickly to duplicate IBM’s model. As IBM moves deeper into the development of reusable assets, however, some wonder where the line is drawn between reusable application components and full-blown applications.

Different customers, similar needs
As he looked across the breadth of consulting operations at IBM’s Global Business Solutions Center (GBSC) in Bangalore, India, Jeby Cherian, who heads the center, had no doubt that the creation of reusable SOA services would cut down on time to implementation and reduce the risk of delivery for clients.